Using Apture to add contextual content blog posts
Posted on June 30, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |
Skimming through my RSS reads today I stumbled on Mashable’s post about Apture. No doubt you’re wondering what the new link types are here in the text. They’re Apture links.
Here’s what it does…once you’ve created an Apture account, added the plug-in to your site, and activated it, Apture lets you quickly link to multiple forms of media for any piece of text in your blog entry. And not just one, you can link to Wikipedia, a news story, a video from You Tube, and a photo on Flickr all from the same key word!
Benefits: Contextual and background information for any concept or idea on your page. Intead of embedding videos into posts, an Apture link pops them up on top of the post when the reader asks for them.
Concerns: The plug-in doesn’t seem to be too IE friendly and has caused a few slow-downs with the blog loading for the first time ina browser.
Wishes: It would be great fun if readers could also easily link to content the same way to augment the author’s posts. Of course, I’m sure we’d want to approve them before they went live.
What do you think? Does it make the page slow? Are the additions worth it or not? Would you add Apture to your site?
Comments
4 Responses to “Using Apture to add contextual content blog posts”
Leave a Reply
I’m using Apture, but have had two problems: It won’t create a Wikipedia link… I just get a spinning spiral-thingy, and the linked material opens in a new tab, not on top of the blog. I’m using it with Typepad, OSX, Flock. Thoughts?
I noticed the timing out on the Wikipedia links but if I paste in a link from Wikipedia it seems to work. How could that be I wonder? I posted it to the bug page for Apture.
Not sure about the browser compatibility. Anyone else using it with Flock? I know it doesn’t play well with IE but seems to work ok with other versions of Firefox.
I’ve installed Apture for my blog, and confirmed that things look/act a bit different using IE instead of Firefox. Otherwise, I’ve not tried it enough yet to run into content problems. I don’t notice the blog itself being slower. I think the additions will be worth it, so my next post or two I’ll try to include some suitable content.
It sounds like an incredible idea, and it WOULD be agreat to be able to approve links suggested by others.
The other day I was excerpting a piece of prose in my blog, and I found myself automatically linking to various sites to explain some of the language in the prose…
…and then I thought, just a minute! Maybe this prose can stand on its own? Maybe it’s a distraction for people to click through in the middle of a sentence, then come back and continue reading. Maybe the mere fact that something IS hyperlinked is enough to derail the reader, making them think they SHOULD follow the link, or implying that the meaning of the linked text is somehow beyond their ability to just parse without help.
It was the first time I’ve ever thought about this, probably because I’m just a casual user fumbling along on my own. I suppose links might DETRACT from the intended purpose of a piece of text.
Someday, I expect, we’ll have INSIVISBLE Apeture-like contexual links, serving more as an instant encyclopedia as opposed to a conspicuous “Hey, click here to explore the hard-coded relationships” sort of thing. That, I think, would be less intrusive.
Maybe piece of blue, underlined text will eventually look “quaint,” as garish as an embedded MIDI file or a comet cursor…